We didn’t take many road trips when I was growing up. My father did not enjoy driving. He didn’t like getting lost and he suffered anxiety about where he would park the car if he ever got to where he was going.
The summer before I started kindergarten, we packed up the ‘56 two-tone Chevy Bel Air with pillows, blankets, suitcases, maps and snacks for the two hour safari to New York. We were off to stay with our German cousins and visit the World’s Fair. From the production my parents made over preparations and provisions you would have thought we were headed to Kenya.
We made it through the wilds of Manhattan and entered the tunnel that stretched from Midtown to Queens. There, the Bel Air transformed itself into a little green rocket ship hurdling through space. Outside the rolled up windows, a blur of neon yellow tile streamed past us in brilliant streaks. My father, white-knuckling the steering wheel with both fleshy hands, fixed his gaze straight ahead and piloted us safely toward the light.
Our relatives’ apartment was on the ground floor of an old, brick walk-up building. Amy was my mother’s cousin. She and her husband had two sons. Eric, Jr. was exactly my age. Like his parents, he was slim with angular features and dark hair. Berny was barely a year old. He was chubby and pink with tufts of wispy, blond hair that stuck out in all directions. He seemed to spend the majority of his time clutching the front of his father’s shirt, a wee, grinning simian-cherub.
My parents, sister and I spent the night on rollout cots in a tiny spare room. The next morning, Amy served us Welch’s grape juice in miniature glass bottles and soft-boiled eggs nestled into fragile china cups. Then it was off to the Fair. We boarded the subway to Flushing Meadows.
As we made our way through the Fair’s entrance, Berny clung to Eric, Sr.’s chest and Eric, Jr. scrambled to keep up with his father’s long strides. I reached up and grasped cousin Amy’s hand. Her large leather pocketbook slid off her shoulder and down her arm, past her own wrist and mine, along my forearm and all the way to my shoulder, where it dangled heavily. We laughed and headed for Dinoland, where enormous animatronic dinosaurs towered over us, snapping their ominous jaws.
We marveled at the 1964 1/2 Ford Mustang as it spun on a giant turntable. We glided on a silent moving platform past Michelangelo’s Pietá. My father held me up to see better. “It’s come all the way from Italy!” he whispered. In pavilions like The Festival of Gas, we were given glimpses of the not too distant future, where we would live in perfect glass houses and be able to see the person we were talking to on the phone and cars would fly.
There was an amusement park at the edge of the Fair. We three oldest kids careened down long, slippery, winding slides. We clambered onto a giant carousel and I hoisted myself up onto a horse that was painted shiny black with a red, jewelled bridle. He had a fiery, rolling eye, contorted neck and gaping mouth. As the first notes of the calliope sounded, the carousel lurched into motion and my horse began to rise and fall on his thick brass pole. My feet did not reach the stirrups. I grabbed the pole with both hands to keep from sliding off the side of my slick steed. Together we galloped and galloped, round and round.
At one point our parents must have thought it was a good idea to push us through a silver tinsel doorway and into a large maze. My big sister and Eric, Jr. quickly left me behind. I didn’t know the word claustrophobic yet, but a hot, white wave of sheer terror tore through my entire body from bow to stern.
I dropped down to the ground and lay still. But looking up, I found that the sky was still above me. I twisted myself around and managed to crawl out the way I’d come in. Outside the tinsel doorway, cousin Amy stood as though she had been waiting all along for me to emerge from the place I had entered. I ran into her outstretched arms and she scooped me up, her massive pocketbook thwunking against the side of my head.
That evening after supper, Eric, Jr. and I were playing with his bike in the hallway outside the apartment. He was not being nice. “Stop it or I’ll tell your father!” I hissed. “Oh you will, will you?” sneered a man’s deep voice out of nowhere. It was Eric Sr., looming in the doorway. (My father was right, he was a spy!) Little Eric beamed a smug, victorious smile. I was outnumbered. I longed to sneak back onto one of the little boats that cruised through It’s a Small World and sail away forever among the happy, singing costumed children of the globe.
Not long after the Fair, Eric, Sr. disappeared. Amy soon packed up her life and two young boys and moved back to Germany. We exchanged Christmas cards for many years, first in English then in German, but I never saw my cousins again.
Unfortunately, someone didn’t like where my father had parked the Bel Air for the duration of our stay in Queens and bent the tail pipe, so that it rubbed the rear Goodyear whitewall all the way back to Connecticut. The Goodyear ruptured just a mile or two before we reached our driveway, further imprinting upon my father’s tender heart the conviction that big cities were dangerous places to leave your car unattended and filled with people who harboured villianous vindictiveness toward innocent families of four from the suburbs.
I took home a few things from the Fair—a love of Mustang convertibles and Michelangelo, a set of plastic dinosaurs and a shelf-sized replica of the Fair’s iconic Unisphere sculpture. For years I stashed my cat’s eye marble collection in the little metal globe. I don’t know what became of the dinosaurs. I still have the Unisphere, but I’ve lost all my marbles.
The theme of the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair was Peace Through Understanding. It is startling to see how scientists, philosophers, artists and engineers imagined the future would manifest. Some of the vision was spot on. But we were also given a snapshot of a future where people (except perhaps for occasional friendly tourists) stayed put in their own countries, wearing quaint, ethnic dress, singing and speaking in their own languages.
What could not have been predicted would be the struggle to integrate our bodies, brains and souls with the rapidity and rigidity of technology. With apologies to ee cummings, we, human merely beings, are the only earthly creatures who are hunted down by our own creations. We are now bombarded incessantly by more information than we can possibly process. And we continue to suffer war, famine and pestilence, largely because of our inability to comprehend that we are, after all, one small world.
We got to this place called now by evolution, exploration, innovation and sometimes by mistake. We got here millimetre by millimetre, moment by moment. And whatever this now is, it is a moment that was once desired, dreaded or dreamt of.
You may be driving slowly through a strange city, looking for a slot to park. You may be afraid, excited, abandoned or stranded on a dark road with a flat whitewall. You may have arrived here soaring, defying space and time, gravity and hesitation or you may have shown up on your hands and knees, shivering and shifting this way and that, tired, slightly carsick, not sure of where you are and with no clear sight to your destination.
You may not ever be able to get over, around, or under this moment. But to get through it, you must choose to be in it, to sit right in the centre of your panic or grief, love, confusion, joy or aloneness, until you can begin to feel the tug of a new direction. Because each of us is moving forward somehow and wherever you find yourself, you will never be far from home.